Hacker

The T-46 was not a JPATS competitor.

Guys that flew the A-37 that I've spoken to are quite honest that they felt very under-gunned and vulnerable in it. Lots of power, very maneuverable, but not the steed they wanted to be riding when iron was in the air. One I spoke to who had been both a Raven FAC and later flew the A-37 said he felt safer in the O-1!

Or two or three decades....

Let's remember that the T-38 was designed as the first supersonic trainer back when the century series fighters were out. Not everything about designing aircraft for trans-sonic and high-Q flight was well understood, but one of those issues was flutter of flight control surfaces. The common answer was to only have surfaces actuated (and thus held rigidly in position during flight) by hydraulics. We didn't have the electronics technology that we do today to have self-isolated hydraulic servos to move flight controls that can be actuated hydraulically, electrically, or mechanically.

This immediately stuck out to me reading the AIB. With a dual engine failure is when the "windmilling hydraulics" discussion is relevant. With a dual gearbox (and thus dual hydraulic) failure, there is no longer a connection between the stick and the flight controls. Those engines can be pumping out as much RPM as you please, but you're along for the ride at that point. And just that much error in analysis is what causes delays to eject and fatalities.

Pin removal, just like in the T-6.

To be fair, this was the case with the aileron bellcrank failure, too. Leadership said, "this is a fly-to-fail item that does not get inspected as part of any of our normal maintenance. We have one-time inspected the fleet and they are all currently good to go. Do your pre-flight flight control checks and knock on the bottom of the wing during your walk-around. Now get back out there and fly." So, all still par for the course.

Stark would be best served if he remains anonymous rather than revealing himself. There is nothing to be gained by Stark becoming part of the solution: he made his points in his articles, an even offered proposed solutions. His job is done. And now leadership can get on with doing their f'n jobs with the issues identified. They shouldn't have needed an anonymous public input "from the trenches", but since they did, the least they could do is actually display some of that leadership skill and take action to fix the identified issues...like they should have been doing all this time anyway without proving Stark's hypotheses true. My favorite part of the article: If you look at the three (or is it four, now?) "Dear Boss" letters that have been made public in the last 40-ish years since Capt Keys' famous letter, you'll note that they ALL cover essentially the same territory and have the same types of complaint. So, how is it that Goldfein thinks that "we got better as a service" as a result of that letter? Is that what it means when people keep bringing up the same problems year after year, decade after decade? Good call, Fingers. Keep your skull down, Col Stark, and keep fighting the good fight.

Words mean stuff.

How far back have you been paying attention to the expansion of the powers of the Executive Branch? Clearly not more than, say, 10 years, if you think this is something even remotely "new".

But, muh right to having a security clearance!

Never mind all that "the only guy in AF history who flew the U-2 in four different decades" cred. 🙂

Jesus, when did "white jet time" become a "credit"?

Link to the full prelim report: https://app.ntsb.gov/pdfgenerator/ReportGeneratorFile.ashx?EventID=20180721X41413&AKey=1&RType=HTML&IType=FA

Excerpt from the preliminary NTSB report:

If any of you were around for the T Mike Moseley CSAF years, people said the same great things about him prior to becoming the Chief. And then....

Welsh was the real deal. I remember watching a video of his post-Desert Storm speech when I was a ROTC cadet in college, and he clearly had a firm grasp on actual combat leadership. He seemed to have that same warrior leadership as he rose through the ranks. As soon as he started wearing 4 stars, though.....

(...not an attempted barrel roll....) 🙂

I would call that something akin to the famous "barrel dive"....or a bad split S, hehe

I'm surprised that nobody has copypasta'd the post the DO of the CAF unit involved made on the day after the accident.

As we told you last year at this time, there are people on baseops that have experience with FEBs (from many different angles, hehe), so if you have an actual question about what you're going through with yours, fire away. Otherwise, we're not really sure what the purpose of this post, and the posts that followed, is.

I must be getting old and senile because I'm totally fucking lost.

Go buy a drill press from Harbor Freight, and a router from them, too. Then go buy the EasyJig, and 80% away. https://www.80percentarms.com/products/80-ar-15-easy-jig The jig comes with the drill bits and end mill for the router, and is really stout. I've completed about 10 80%s of different sources, and with the exception of the first one (which was admittedly a learning experience on many levels, but fixed up nicely with some JB Weld and re-milling!) they all turned out great. YouTube is your friend with all of this stuff: plenty of good tutorials, even with YouTube's latest gun control search-and-destroy attempt to eradicate videos showing how to "build assault weaponz!!!1!!"

Here's about as specific data as I can get you: 50/50. As of this morning, my logbook has my Purple flying time with 732.2 hours, 365.9 is day and 366.3 is night. This is the context: I have been at FX for just over 2 years, so still quite new in the grand scheme, but at 80-ish% seniority at the company already due to the constant hiring in the last two years and the steady retirement flow. I'm on the A300, which is nearly all domestic flying, with a little international that goes very senior. I am at about 69% (NS-TFS!) seniority in the right seat, and for some perspective the Bus is a relatively senior airplane because of the domestic-only widebody flying: the top half of the A300 FO list is very heavy with senior FOs who have been parked there for years and are not moving. The bidpack for the A300 is about evenly split between day flying and night flying, with a lot of variations of it (out-and-backs, multi-day trips, hub-turn overnights etc) of both day and night flavor. My seniority progression (in terms of schedule bidding) has been rapid, to say the least. - After completing training, 3 months of reserve, most of which was A Reserve (night flying). - Could hold secondary lines at month 4 out of training (secondaries are flying lines made up of scheduled trips and sometimes reserve days. Some months had nights, some months had days) - Held commutable night flying lines at 12 months at the company (9 months out of training) - Can hold commutable day flying lines at less than 2 years at the company. The interesting thing is that night flying doesn't necessarily always go junior. Over the last two years, my day/night balance has pushed over into 60/40 days and 60/40 nights, depending on what I bid and what I can hold, but up to this point it always trends back toward the center of 50/50. We shall see what it brings in the future now that I can consistently hold commutable day-flying lines, and that's what I intend to keep bidding. For some further context, I had originally intended to bid over to the 777 as soon as I could, due to a bunch of factors that @JeremiahWeed has posted about in these threads before. However, the last two system bids at FX have seen a lot of A300 FOs leaving for greener pastures (either 777/MD FO, or 75 Captain, or even A300 Captain) and very few FOs coming *to* the Bus. This is mostly because the guys coming off the 757 have a much easier transition training difficulty & footprint going to the 76 than to the Bus. What this means is that my seniority continues to rapidly advance in the right seat of the Bus -- in fact, scheduled to go up 30+% in just this next 12-18 months. So...I kicked back the plans to leave, and am instead going to enjoy a little taste of seniority (rather than "juniority") here this early on in my career at Purple.

Seriously -- single-pilot or autonomous ops at the cargo carriers aren't going to be the order of the day in the career-span of anyone currently reading this forum who is in a position to get hired in the next half dozen years. FedEx won't even spend the money to make sure the A300 FMS has the memory and processing power to operate in the full RNP/RNAV environment, instead opting to delete points out of the database that are at airports not served by the A300. So I don't see them jumping on a technology that isn't cheaper than just paying a regular old pilot to do the work. As soon as FAA-approved autonomous technology (and all the associated satellite time, system mx, reliability, etc) is a dollar cheaper than a pilot...well, then, count on it being the order of the day. But it isn't. Just look at how slow the FAA is to approve nearly *anything* technology related. Look at how advanced the avionics are that the experimental world has, and how nearly none of that is getting certification at anything other than a snail's pace, if at all. Go back and look at the archives of FlightInfo.com or APC and you'll see exactly the same fear-mongering in the mid-late 90s, and people saying cargo pilots were gonna be out of a job in 10 years. Those predictions aren't aging particularly well.